The proliferation of cloud-based services and platforms continues to increase. Specifically, cloud-based content management services and platforms have impacted the way personal and corporate electronically stored information objects (e.g., files, images, videos, etc.) are stored, and has also impacted the way such personal and corporate content is shared and managed. One benefit of using such cloud-based platforms is the ability to securely share large volumes of content among trusted collaborators on a variety of user devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptop computers, desktop computers, and/or other devices. For example, a large enterprise with thousands of users (e.g., employees) and many terabytes of content might use a cloud-based content storage platform to efficiently and securely facilitate content access to various individual users and/or collaborative groups of users. In such cases, a user can access a large volume of objects stored in the cloud-based platform from a user device that might store merely a small portion of that volume locally. Such access can enable multiple users (e.g., collaborators) to manage certain shared objects for various collaborative purposes (e.g., co-development, audience presentation, etc.). Specifically, users can manage (e.g., create, view, edit, execute, etc.) the shared objects using various applications operating on a user device.
For example, multiple users might collaborate on the development of a certain design document using a respective instance of an application operating on a respective user device. In such cases, some of the users might collaborate by concurrently managing (e.g., viewing, editing, etc.) the design document on their user devices in an online mode or an offline mode. Such local shared object access might require certain synchronization and/or conflict remediation operations to occur to facilitate the collaboration. In some cases, such collaborative documents and/or other objects stored in the cloud-based content storage platform can be large.
Unfortunately, legacy techniques for facilitating collaboration on cloud-based shared content objects on a local user device can be limited at least as pertaining to local access latencies and/or synchronization associated with the shared content objects. Specifically, certain legacy approaches might allocate a local cache on the user device to store certain content objects (e.g., currently managed objects, recently accessed objects) for improved access latencies for such objects. For large content objects (e.g., a 500-page design document with pictures), while the user might desire to merely access a small portion of the document, such legacy approaches might completely fill the local cache with the full document (e.g., all of the words and all of the pictures). In such cases, the user might experience a long latency. Further, legacy cache allocation and/or management approaches are inefficient in facilitating the synchronization and/or conflict remediation aspects of a highly collaborative, shared content environment. Specifically, for example, such legacy approaches are limited as pertaining to cache allocation and/or cache management capabilities vis-à-vis the various content states (e.g., online, offline, updated, etc.) associated with such highly collaborative shared content environments.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.